Historic Decisions

Looking back at the completed project, Ethan Landis, principal of Landis Construction Co. in Washington, D.C., says that everything about the finished project is well done.

“This was an A-plus job,” says Landis. “The quality of construction, the attention to detail, the finish selections, the performance of the home, the comfort of the home for the homeowner, all of those things are very good.”

Indeed, Landis’ gut-rehab of a town house in the historic Georgetown area of Washington achieved nearly all of the objectives set forth by the homeowners when they embarked on the project more than two years ago. The owners had intended to purchase the home on a speculative basis, renovate it to a very high green and luxury standard, and then sell. One financial crisis and a number of logistical challenges later, the owners now live in the home along with other members of their extended family.

“They are extremely happy with it,” says Landis, “with almost no regrets.”

The owner’s desire for a deeply green renovation, perhaps one that would ultimately achieve LEED Platinum certification, stemmed from her career as a realtor. LEED is a designation offered by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) that was first introduced for commercial projects. LEED is an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. This owner had developed a specialty in selling “green” homes. “Even if they broke even on the project,” says Landis, “they wanted to learn about the process and gain from the experience professionally.”

Even though Landis Construction is a design/build firm and co-owner Chris Landis is an AIA accredited architect, they were brought in after another architect, Erik Hoffland, AIA, had already been engaged on the project. It was his drawings and schematics that were used to secure financing for the project and to later build it out. Both Hoffland and Ethan Landis are LEED accredited professionals, so once the funding was in place, the project began in earnest.

Because the goal was to achieve LEED certification for the home and because the design and construction responsibilities were split among two firms, the first step, says Landis, was to hold a design charette where many choices and courses of action were determined well ahead of time. Involved in the charette were the owners, the architect, the general contractor and key trade contractors.

“Though we had walked along the LEED pathway with other projects,” notes Landis, “this was to be the first time we planned to earn LEED certification and possibly LEED Platinum, so we really needed to get everyone on the same page.”

Embarking on a deeply green project required the knowledge and a commitment from the owners that it would undoubtedly cost more than a conventional remodel, particularly since the scope of the project was large. They took a 2,200-sq.-ft. town house, tore off the back, built a three-story addition and dug a deeper basement, all while gutting and preserving the façade in accordance with strict guidelines set forth to preserve the historic streetscapes of Georgetown. The finished project added approximately 1,000 sq. ft. to the home for a total of 3,300 sq. ft. All told, the project cost about $1 million with an estimate $30,000 to $40,000 of that cost attributable to green and sustainable aspects of the project, or 3 percent of the total cost, Landis estimates.

He explains that many of the key product selections that helped the project along the green pathway would have been selected regardless of whether the intent was to earn points toward LEED certification or not, so the exact cost of green features can be fuzzy. Case in point was the decision to lower the floor of the basement in order to gain more ceiling space in what was to be an in-law suite. They could have poured a normal basement slab floor but opted instead to make it an insulated slab.

“Once you have that floor out, what is the increased expense to make the slab insulated and get an extra LEED point? It is an extra $1,000. And then you say, ‘Well, that is simply a good building practice’; we likely would have done it anyway. These were the type of green selections that were easy for us to make. The really tough decisions were those that were required in order to achieve a high LEED rating that you otherwise would not have wanted.”

A good example of one such tough decision would be the LEED requirement that all of the home’s walls be entirely opened up, insulated and inspected before the wallboard is installed again. This requirement precludes a possible decision to opt to blow in insulation down a closed wall cavity while building a very tight addition to the house. But since the aim was to get LEED certified, all walls of the existing house were gutted and insulated with an expanding open-cell, soy-based foam insulation. This requirement added substantial time and cost to the project and is the key difference between a green remodel and a remodel that achieved LEED Platinum certification.

“With LEED, you cannot do half a house,” Landis explains. “You have to do the whole thing. Overall LEED for Homes is a great, very well thought out, very well tested, sophisticated regime, but it is not a building code. It is not a process where you open the book and follow A to Z and come out the other end with a superior product. It is somewhat interpretive. In this situation if someone comes to the table with the right attitude. And they want the best, or certainly an excellent product, at the end of it; it is a great system in which to achieve that outcome.”

Historic Preservation

Anyone who walks the streets of the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. is struck by its many charms — the cobblestone streets, the tree-lined sidewalks and an unrivaled collection of 18th- and 19th-century homes that provide a perfectly preserved streetscape dating from a bygone era. These charms did not happen by accident. They are the result of a rigid set of preservation codes enforced by no less than three separate bodies of preservationists who oversee all alterations to building facades throughout the district. Like Washington’s many federal monuments, the Georgetown district falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government’s Fine Arts Council.

Within that council, a separate subcommittee is devoted to hearings and approvals relating to Georgetown. The third layer of preservationists is the Washington, D.C., Historic Preservation Review Board. Brother and partner Chris Landis, AIA, is a member of this board, but his presence there was of little consequence in this case because the Georgetown group’s recommendations are usually rubber stamped by the other two.

Getting a project through the historic preservation process can be cumbersome and can potentially impose costly delays if the project needs to go back to the commission repeatedly in order to win final approval. In this case, says

Landis, the process took two presentations to the committee to win approval. But the commission meets only once per month and does not meet at all in the month of August, so timing is a major factor. Ironically, the home is not nearly as old as most of the neighboring structures, many of which date to the early 1800s. This house was built in 1900, well after the neighborhood was already built, but since all of Georgetown falls under the jurisdiction of preservationists, so too did this house.

“The owners did not buy this house because it was historic,” says Landis. “That was not their initial goal. However, it became clear very quickly that we’d have to work with the historic authorities. Our clients were not going to try to get around any rules.

They just wanted to know the balance between historic and green. And it became clear very quickly that there is no balance. Historic trumps everything when it comes to the façade of a house like this.”

Very little about a Georgetown façade can be altered, says Ethan Landis. If a home was originally built with painted wood siding, then its renovation must also use painted wood siding that matches the original. This goes for windows as well. In most cases, they cannot be changed out, not even for the most architecturally correct replicas which can be achieved by many leading window manufacturers. Instead, says Ethan Landis, each of the original windows in the front of the house had to be restored. Broken weights had to be fixed. Old paint needed to be stripped away and replaced in order to make them operable. Lastly full-lite, custom-made wood storm windows were made to fit as tightly as possible for each existing window.

“You obviously restore the window and improve its weatherization,” says Landis. “To our surprise, we did blower-door tests afterward and discovered that these restored windows in combination with good quality storm windows installed on top, were about 90 percent as efficient as brand new Weather Shield windows installed in the newer sections of the house.”

In the final analysis, after the project was complete, Landis sat with the owners and asked them to summarize their satisfaction with the project. They were extremely happy with the results. Of their three “regrets” all related to factors beyond the control of the architect and the contractor. Water service needed to be replaced out to the street resulting in a $30,000 cost variance. A neighbor delayed the project with issues relating to an easement. And lastly, a number of problems with the cabinet manufacturer resulted in a long delay.

From Landis’ perspective the only regret was not being able to handle the design in-house. The process would have gone more smoothly, he says. “If we were to design this in-house, that would have helped dramatically.”